Rita Faria’s journal round-up for 18th June 2018

Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.

The economic evaluation world has been discussing cost-effectiveness thresholds for a while. This paper has been out for a few months, but it slipped under my radar. It explains the relationship between the cost-effectiveness threshold, the budget, opportunity costs and willingness to pay for health. My take-home messages are that we should use cost-effectiveness analysis to inform decisions both for publicly funded and privately funded health care systems. Each system has a budget and a way of raising funds for that budget. The cost-effectiveness threshold should be specific for each health care system, in order to reflect its specific opportunity cost. The budget can change for many reasons. The cost-effectiveness threshold should be adjusted to reflect these changes and hence reflect the opportunity cost. For example, taxpayers can increase their willingness to pay for health through increased taxes for the health care system. We are starting to see this in the UK with the calls to raise taxes to increase the NHS budget. It is worth noting that the NICE threshold may not warrant adjustment upwards since research suggests that it does not reflect the opportunity cost. This is a welcome paper on the topic and a must read, particularly if you’re arguing for the use of cost-effectiveness analysis in settings that traditionally were reluctant to embrace it, such as the US.

Using cost-effectiveness analysis to inform coverage decisions not only for the public but also for the privately funded health care is also a feature of this study by Jan Boone. I’ll admit that the equations are well beyond my level of microeconomics, but the text is good at explaining the insights and the intuition. Boone grapples with the question about how the public and private health care systems should choose which technologies to cover. Boone concludes that, when choosing which technologies to cover, the most cost-effective technologies should be prioritised for funding. That the theory matches the practice is reassuring to an economic evaluator like myself! One of the findings is that cost-effective technologies which are very cheap should not be covered. The rationale being that everyone can afford them. The issue for me is that people may decide not to purchase a highly cost-effective technology which is very cheap. As we know from behaviour economics, people are not rational all the time! Boone also concludes that the inclusion of technologies in the universal basic package should consider the prevalence of the conditions in those people at high risk and with low income. The way that I interpreted this is that it is more cost-effective to include technologies for high-risk low-income people in the universal basic package who would not be able to afford these technologies otherwise, than technologies for high-income people who can afford supplementary insurance. I can’t cover here all the findings and the nuances of the theoretical model. Suffice to say that it is an interesting read, even if you avoid the equations like myself.

As we are on the topic of cost-effectiveness thresholds, this is a study on the threshold in Ireland. This study sets out to find out if the current cost-effectiveness threshold is too high given the ICERs of the 20 procedures with the largest waiting lists. The idea is that, if the current cost-effectiveness threshold is correct, the procedures with large and long waiting lists would have an ICER of above the cost-effectiveness threshold. If the procedures have a low ICER, the cost-effectiveness threshold may be set too high. I thought that Figure 1 is excellent in conveying the discordance between ICERs and waiting lists. For example, the ICER for extracapsular extraction of crystalline lens is €10,139/QALY and the waiting list has 10,056 people; the ICER for surgical tooth removal is €195,155/QALY and the waiting list is smaller at 833. This study suggests that, similar to many other countries, there are inefficiencies in the way that the Irish health care system prioritises technologies for funding. The limitation of the study is in the ICERs. Ideally, the relevant ICER compares the procedure with the standard care in Ireland whilst on the waiting list (“no procedure” option). But it is nigh impossible to find ICERs that meet this condition for all procedures. The alternative is to assume that the difference in costs and QALYs is generalisable from the source study to Ireland. It was great to see another study on empirical cost-effectiveness thresholds. Looking forward to knowing what the cost-effectiveness threshold should be to accurately reflect opportunity costs.